> No matter what your standard of "real harm," free speech has examples where it risks causing real harm.
I think you must have either a very broad interpretation of what counts as "speech" or a very loose concept of causality. My standard of "real harm", which I do not consider particularly idiosyncratic, essentially comes down to bodily injury or property damage. (How other people think about you—reputation—is not included; neither does IP count as actual property.) Speech is purely the communication of information (of any sort) from one person to another, which by its nature causes neither bodily injury nor property damage. Speech may influence listeners may go on to inflict bodily injury or property damage, but to say that the speech caused the harm ignores the agency of those responsible for acting on it. Mere influence does not nullify choice or personal responsibility.
Freedom of religion falls under a similar category; your beliefs are your own and you ought not be persecuted (or prosecuted) for them, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass if you act on those beliefs in a way that harms others. Theft is still theft, and punishable as such, even if your religion disavows private property. Murder is still murder even if your religion calls for human sacrifice. Etc.
In both cases you have to start with the much more fundamental right to do anything which does not directly harm other people or their property in order to answer the question of which particular forms of expression (of speech or religious sentiment) are actually protected. Speech and religious expression are subsets of the set of things you already have every right to do specifically because they do not harm others, and only really make sense in that context. The key point of the dual freedoms of speech and religion is to emphasize that actions you would otherwise be free to take do not suddenly become out-of-bounds based on the information content or religious affiliation.
How exactly do you quantify this harm? Most of these re-definitions of "harmful" speech always seem unclear and difficult to define. Under the current legal framework (which you said you disagreed with) we already have standards and methods of quantifying that harm when speech directly incites violence. These same measures also explicitly define anything else as not harmful.
The way I see it, the government has more of a duty to protect free speech than it does to prevent nebulous, poorly-defined and indirect harm. Outside of these moral implications (that no speech is fundamentally harmful, that we must have the freedom to have incorrect ideas), efforts to "prevent harmful speech" always seem to hurt society and individuals when put into practice. There is always the problem of who defines what harm is (usually it's the government) and such measures exist now explicitly to prevent the government from infringing on these rights.
>Speech and actions are different. Society can tolerate any kind of speech, because they're words.
This is false; there is no metaphysical difference between "speech" and "action"; I'd check out the work of Fred Schauer or more recently Susan Brison on this point. There are many examples (see citation) of speech having the ability to directly harm without any other action, from psychological harms to contextual harms. Indeed, in many segregationist policies, it wasn't the segregation that made it ugly, it was the effects of the contents of the law which provided denigration through authority.
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but words will never hurt me" is empirically untenable[0], and like actions, speech can cause negative involuntary reactions. It also seems unfair to place the burden of "hardening" one's ability to feel this pain on the people whom the words are targeted at.
Free speech is not a legal concept. The most cited example of speech being used to harm others is shouting "Fire" in crowded theatre and people dying in the stampede to leave. There is no legal protection for doing so. Speech has consequences, sometimes benign, sometimes not.
That's not true at all; threats, for instance, are not incitements to violence, yet they cause harm. Fraud can be speech, but it is harmful. One philosopher noted how in his profession, if someone broke his left leg, this would not even compare to the kind of harm he'd suffer if someone wrote an slanderous piece against him and published it in a big newspaper. "Whites only" signs can be said to cause harm.
Put it this way: if speech cannot cause any harm, then it would be almost pointless to have a law which guarantees freedom of speech.
Aside from all this, the first source I linked is a good paper that already goes over this distinction of harm which you've outlined and how baseless it is. As I have already said: there is no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech actions:
>I argued that all speech is conduct, involving an agent, and all conduct, being intentional action, is expressive (of the motivating intention); that speech does not differ from other conduct in being context-dependent and subject to interpretation; that speech is a physical phenomenon, having physical effects on its listeners, effects which can be caused by the content of the speech; and that verbal assaults can be harmful in the same ways that assaults involving direct bodily contact are. For these (and other) reasons, I concluded that the attempt to assimilate freedom of speech to freedom of thought and in that way distinguish it from freedom of action fails.
All speech has an effect otherwise no one would bother talking. The question is not whether it has an effect, but whether it causes enough harm to justify stopping it. Older than the fire in the theater example (which if I remember rightly comes from a supreme court case in the US) is John Stuart Mill:
>An opinion that corndealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.
But he then of course gives one of the most brilliant defenses of free speech in all circumstances other than direct harm ever written. Do you think this is going to cause direct harm?
> Freedom of speech and expression, therefore, may not be recognized as being absolute, and common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."
When the expression of speech causes harm, then the line is drawn. This is the general interpretation ranging from SCOTUS to free speech philosophers like John Stuart Mill.
I think the damages are clear enough when eleven people are murdered.
Speech is never "just speech": it enables and compels people to take actions. That's why free speech is important in the first place. In the same spirit, that's why free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
Yes absolutely, I meant actions that directly harm others.
The problem is that once you start going down the path to prohibit something that might indirectly cause harm you've basically given your government permission to ban anything they want to because they are always going to find some data that proves any action as indirectly harming someone somewhere.
Today we even police people that cause harm to the feelings of others by saying something that the person disagrees with.
Freedom of speech becomes pointless if you are only granting it to those who say things that do not offend anyone. That's the kind of freedom of speech that Stalin allowed in the Soviet Union. You may only say things that Stalin likes or that he isn't offended by.
That's why I'm principled about this. Let instead courts determine such issues. If you can successfully prove in a court of law that you have been harmed then you have the right to claim damages. Others will take note of the result and adjust their behaviour accordingly.
> slander, libel, fraud, harassment and incitement to violence?
They're not saying that what speech qualifies as free speech has no exceptions whatsoever[0]. They're saying that you can't do a end run around the entire concept of free speech by laundering your enforcement under the vague heading of "consequences", when those consequences are a result of your enforcement.
0: It should have as few exceptions as possible, of course, but if nothing else you shouldn't be able to get away with murder by claiming that the nerve impulses to your trigger finger are free speech, and that shouldn't be a property of nerve impulses versus other ways of transmitting information.
Incitement to violence isn't necessarily protected speech in the US.
The boundary is of necessity vague. IMNSHO: arguing that free speech should be absolute is almost tantamount to arguing it is irrelevant. Isn't the point that messages matter, and being able to exchange them is powerful? Then clearly that power can be used - and abused. Thus to argue that it is right to never constrain speech implies you either believe it is of no consequence; or believe harm is good (i.e. are malicious or insane); or believe enforcement is impossible or counter-productive.
A dose of rationality in the free speech debate would be appreciated. Heck, it's not like this is the only exception... libel, fraud, and a variety of IP laws all suggest a long history of consistently democratically-backed infringements to free speech. Were our ancestors all crazy?
Though it doesn't entirely answer your question, several philosophers of speech have identified no metaphysical difference between speech and non-speech, and some find the justifications for a law guaranteeing freedom of speech to be ultimately unfounded[0]. The issue for them is not whether speech causes harm (it does) but whether the harms are sufficient to allow some kind of regulation on speech; there is no evidence showing that speech "invariably causes less harm [than non-speech]". Several have argued this to be the case in the context of hate speech or pornography - it's conceivable their arguments may extend to widening current law (or college policy, since most discussion on the topic takes place in the context of universities[1]) to take into account microaggressions - which, as the researchers have noted, may not always be conscious[2].
"Speech may influence someone to act in a certain manner, but it doesn't cause them to act that way—they have to choose to act, and in doing so take full responsibility for the consequences."
Replace "speech" with "bribery" or a mafia boss giving an order to commit a crime.
Causality, in the sense that you're using it, is legalistic. In practice, the Jonestown religion/cult, it's beliefs, and membership did cause a mass suicide and murder. That obviously doesn't absolve anyone of anything, but you can't exonerate the religion on a philosophical technicality. Religion is a right. That does not mean that it is harmless, powerless or unrelated to causality.
Speech is just the same. Voting too. Powerful. Dangerous.
If you believe that free speech needs to be protected because it causes no harm... that's the road to losing it, because it's premised on a demonstrable untruth.
If freedom of speech is important, speech must have the power to have real consequences. If something has real consequences, those can be either bad, good, or neutral.
If all consequences of speech were neutral or positive, we could make the world a better place by connecting a source of randomness with a text-to-speech synthesiser. But that's absurd.
Therefore, speech has the ability to harm. The distinction between "words" and "actions" is meaningless, as is already obvious from your inclusion of harassment in your list of actions. Because harassment is also just speech.
But the government isn't allowed to regulate the speech based on harm unless that harm would result from lawless action which is also incited by the speech and probable to happen based on the speech.
Very true; I'm reminded of the funny example used in debates on these matters, in which a legal professor is saying he'd rather have somebody break his left leg than to publish something alleging sexual misconduct with a student, and further, there are absolutely non-physical harms which can cause just as much, if not more, pain and anguish than physical harms. In this view, the idea that speech should be able to contain any content by law is about as ridiculous as saying that actions in general should be able to contain any content. The first amendment in the US is on a very shaky metaphysical model which does not accord with what we know about the brain or trauma.
I fail to understand the distinction in a way that would be generally applicable though.
I lack the cultural context for US but in many other cultures, expressing a valid rational position can be actively harmful to one.
At what point something becomes harassment? Can you give me more details?
Suppose I am actively promoting eating beef in public space near a very religious vegan settlement. Is that speech protected or not?
It is targetting people based on their belief but the whole spectrum of who it is not clear at all unless one intends to assume malice and fill in the gaps. All I would be doing is to promote eating beef because it's good and healthy.
Does placing restrictions on where you can talk violates your free speech despite it being public property? Say, a restraining order or something similar.
I think you must have either a very broad interpretation of what counts as "speech" or a very loose concept of causality. My standard of "real harm", which I do not consider particularly idiosyncratic, essentially comes down to bodily injury or property damage. (How other people think about you—reputation—is not included; neither does IP count as actual property.) Speech is purely the communication of information (of any sort) from one person to another, which by its nature causes neither bodily injury nor property damage. Speech may influence listeners may go on to inflict bodily injury or property damage, but to say that the speech caused the harm ignores the agency of those responsible for acting on it. Mere influence does not nullify choice or personal responsibility.
Freedom of religion falls under a similar category; your beliefs are your own and you ought not be persecuted (or prosecuted) for them, but that doesn't mean you get a free pass if you act on those beliefs in a way that harms others. Theft is still theft, and punishable as such, even if your religion disavows private property. Murder is still murder even if your religion calls for human sacrifice. Etc.
In both cases you have to start with the much more fundamental right to do anything which does not directly harm other people or their property in order to answer the question of which particular forms of expression (of speech or religious sentiment) are actually protected. Speech and religious expression are subsets of the set of things you already have every right to do specifically because they do not harm others, and only really make sense in that context. The key point of the dual freedoms of speech and religion is to emphasize that actions you would otherwise be free to take do not suddenly become out-of-bounds based on the information content or religious affiliation.
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